Dear Feastlings,
Tucson has a rare talent. As I’ve noted here before, I’m not the only procrastinator in town, and this year, like most others, we found ourselves wondering if we’d gambled and lost. Turkeys for Thanksgiving are ordered in August, so we bet on how many we’ll need for the big day, and when they come in, we struggle to find walk-in space, and then there begins a project management cascade of events that’s somewhere in between choreography and parkour. Fear creeps in, however, when, a week before Thanksgiving, only eighteen or so of the sixty-four turkeys we’ve committed to have been accounted for in meals ordered.
Mercifully, a number of you are very like me. I write this on Thanksgiving Day, having spent twenty-three of the previous forty-eight hours on my feet, working at tables that are about four inches lower than my spine wishes they were, because somehow, in the last three days before our ordering deadline, Tucson pulled it out for us like it was the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded. Truly, today is a day of thanks over here. Moreover, it’s a day of thanks because the crew came together like nobody’s business to get it all prepared. Despite having two people call out in the days leading up to yesterday, and despite a line cook texting that she was going into a rather early labor Wednesday morning and texting me photos of her tiny new son by 12:30, and despite tempers flaring and a few major and minor spinouts among the staff, people came together to finish cooking and package food until 11:00 Tuesday night, both dining room and kitchen staff.
On Wednesday, there were last-minute trips to various stores as we figured out how short we’d come up on stuffing and squash stew, on dark meat and Brussels sprouts, and frantic cooking at three and four and five o’clock to get those shortcomings resolved by their six and seven and eight o’clock pickups. People who hadn’t worked at Feast in years came in to help us through, and people who’d never worked at Feast but with who I’d worked at other restaurants over thirty years ago. People hunched over a potato ricer the size of a fist when the food mill died a grisly death. People drank coffee in eye-popping volumes. Thanksgiving week has been the week that broke people for years now, whether I was pulling turkeys out of the ovens at 2:00 am to put more in, or whether it precipitated a bender that sent someone into treatment and took them off the roster altogether. Last year found us scrambling to buy last-minute frozen turkeys to thaw frantically, after eight or ten birds were brined in a brine so egregiously over-salted that the ensuing tailspin led to another permanent departure, and a heap of angry, profanity-laden texts.
This year was a good one, though. We had disappointments, to be sure, but in the end, I found myself drifting into introspection rather than hanging onto simmering grudges, and coming away seeing myself in everyone on the crew, be they slacker, be they team player, or be they overwhelmed to the point of being incapacitated- I’ve been each of those before. The Thanksgiving gift that laid itself on my doorstep was the fleeting ability to see that each of us is going through something, and sometimes we handle it better than we handle it at other times, and that I got very lucky this year not to be defeated by the week of Thanksgiving. I owe a debt of thanks to the people who stepped up and put together hundreds of Thanksgiving meals, and to those who ordered those meals, and especially to those who owed me nothing and contributed more than I deserved.
With Thanksgiving behind us, I’m back to my usual level of being overwhelmed- we’re putting together Saturday’s end-of-the-month wine tasting,
which still has room for people to join in, and with only two days of service left in this month, I’m still writing the December menu that’ll begin on Tuesday, but that’s a level of stress I’ve lived with for the past 24 1/2 years, so if you come in today or tomorrow, expect to see me a bit wild-eyed, but otherwise recovered.
I also note here that we’ve got a visit from winemaker Joey Tensley on the calendar on Tuesday, December 9th, and you’re welcome and encouraged to reserve a seat at that dinner as well.
Next Tuesday is not only new menu day, but it’s Giving Tuesday, and as such, I’ll be chattering on KUAZ from nine to eleven AM, and giving away a couple of Feast gift certificates as I encourage people to donated to Arizona Public Media. So if you’re the sort that’s inclined to donate to AZPM anyhow, you may as well do it at a time when you can win a gift certificate.
It being Giving Tuesday, we should finally have something set up to make a donation run again to people in need of food assistance, so by the time I get off the air at KUAZ, come have the monthly staff menu meeting, and put out whatever metaphorical fires are smoldering, I hope to send out another email with a link to the menu I’ll finish today, as well as a way to help us (or, really, allow us to help you) donate food to those in need.
Meanwhile, I thank you all for your patience, your support and your general kindness to all of us at Feast. We’re doing the backstroke in gratitude for you all.
Love,
Doug